A Monster Calls
2011
- mothers and sons
- single-parent families
- fiction
- loss (psychology)
- schools
- self-actualization (psychology)
- breast cancer
- monsters
- cancer
- juvenile fiction
The story
A brilliant, graphic novel written by young but promising Patrick Ness. This is the story about 13 year old Conor and his mother who is dying of cancer. Conor has to face the cruelty of real life and learn to let his close and dearest go. When no human can help him Monster appears...
What it’s like
Hushed, grief-soaked quiet with a sharp ache of longing, the kind of book that rewards slow reading in a dim room. Its prose is spare and rhythmic, with short declarative lines broken by stretches of ink-washed illustration, heavy black shadows, and sudden splashes of white, so the page itself seems to breathe and darken. Ordinary British settings take on a bleak, rain-streaked quality: a bedroom with the curtain half drawn, a school corridor, a hospital waiting area that hums with fluorescent indifference. The rhythm is uneven on purpose, lurching between quiet domestic scenes and the monster's enormous, fable-like stories, which are told in bold, almost mythic cadence. Emotionally it sits in a tender, unsentimental register, following a lonely thirteen-year-old boy who slowly, painfully learns to stop refusing the truth of his mother's illness and to let her go. Intensity is low to moderate: there is no gore, and the menace comes from the monster's imposing presence and the fear of a child, with a few brief but harrowing moments of emotional and physical distress. It suits a rainy Sunday, a late evening alone, or a reader who wants grief handled honestly and gently. It is for readers who want melancholy without cruelty and who appreciate illustrated, lyrical storytelling aimed at teens and adults alike.
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